


The Weight of Earthquakes

by dentinthesystem



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Destiel - Freeform, M/M, WW1, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-08
Packaged: 2017-11-23 11:25:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/621612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dentinthesystem/pseuds/dentinthesystem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the disappearance of their father, Dean Winchester convinced his brother to join the war effort, and then soon found himself on the front lines of Ypres, 1914, as part of the Canadian military. Fuelled with a burning desire to find John and a firm hatred of the enemy, Dean cannot be swayed from his goal. But Dean's fixed outlook on the war effort is in danger of shattering due to a brief, unprecedented truce - and a German soldier called Cas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Out of the Frying Pan, Back in the Fire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ofvulcan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ofvulcan/gifts).



> Though hours of research were put into this piece, sources varied and the details of events should not be taken as 100% factual. This work is meant as no disrespect to the soldiers who lost their lives in war, but merely a reflection on the ignorance and propaganda that lead them there. My first fanfic, comments/tips/feedback appreciated. Will be updated weekly.

The pits of hell weren’t round, gaping holes – they were long, jagged ditches, turning sharply at angles, water slopping at your ankles, the screams of the fallen echoing eternally in your ears. Hell was for the living. Hell was here, with the disease, the shuddering crashes of explosives, the pounding of blood in your ears as a boy collapsed screaming in front of you, the red ooze pulsing from the hole in his face, or his gut, or his arm. And then he’d be trampled under the duckboards, or kicked accidentally underneath by some desperately scampering, desperately _living_ , soldier.

It was the dead who had some happiness.

It was _here_ that the living acted like the murderous monsters themselves – those horrifying beings said to inhabit the afterlife of the damned.

Each boy acted differently, in a way. Almost in some desperate subconscious attempt to give their own death some independence to it, a silent scream of hope – remember me, please. Oh God, please, at least remember I existed. Like a writhing mutt, a flailing horse. Lizards - who lost limbs and relentlessly struggled onwards, sprawling in the muck. They thrashed and kicked and gasped.

But since when had animals done worse to one another? Was it better to be wild, untamed, random? Was it really, _truly_ worth it, then – once all was said and done, and the numbers added up, and the counts announced. Dean Winchester didn’t know the math. He simply knew what it was like to live through it – he _had_ to live through it – didn’t he?

There were very few survival facts he’d managed to scrounge, to wedge firmly into his brain, yet perhaps the most gut-wrenching of all was passivity – one could not surive lunging forwards to the aid to every fallen boy, not if they wanted to last the hour.

And it was like a constant itch in his head – all those people he couldn’t, yet should have, saved. Like individual bullet holes blasted right through him. Riddled with emptiness. But soon, the count of faces had risen to the point where they were indistinguishable – impossible to define one bloody mud-streaked face from the next, in the film reel of his mind. Like he was only gaining small glimpses of them, and through someone else’s spectacles.

But somehow it was their actions, those desperate flails that occurred in their last moments, that stuck so lucidly in his mind, they might have been a sharp fragment of glass. As if he, Dean, could see himself making those same animalisic movements, the same roar of agony escaping his lips. He wondered if he’d go, when he eventually did, with any more dignity than his comrades.

Sometimes, as occasionally as they made it, they’d roll forwards, or loose their balance, and instead of collapsing in the mud, they’d tumble head first into the pit of (relative) safety. Some of them made it. Some of them were injured so severely they were left for dead. Some of them simply lay there, their brains dashed against the duckboards, or a rock protruding from the mud. Some of them were dead before they hit the ground.

The crack of a skull against a duckboard would be practically inaudible through the distant screeches of other animals, of the ceaseless gunfire. But the impact might as well have been deafening.

And then they’d sweep that body away – gently rolling, or kicking in a panicked frenzy, down, away, as far as one could away from this lifeless form, as if it was already teeming with disease.

Some boys though, they were resilient. Like roaches. So frustratingly difficult to stamp out, so indifferent to those many attempts made on their very existence. Like they’d almost forgotten about it – or they were too stupid to learn their lesson.

No, some roaches – it was as if they’d been stomped hard on the head by the boot of some screeching cook, not hard enough to kill them, just hard enough to damage them. So that they no longer knew left from right, up from down, so that they ran in circles, straight back into the path of danger.

But humans – they were more complex and (perhaps) more foolish for it. Because it wasn’t Dean Winchester’s lack of direction that had him hastily stumbling back into the mud-caked trenches that crisp winter evening, but his priorities. He’d _wanted_ to return _._

The trenches of Ypres were no exception to any other location on the front lines – just as brutal, just as muddy. A rag-tag collection of Brits and Canadians, all so evenly coated in the general muck of the place that it was impossible to tell the difference through the mottled stains on their once crisp uniforms, until they spoke and the obvious disparity of their accents peirced the air.

Dean was more or less the same as he’d been the last time he’d walked these duckboards – perhaps with his brown Canadian uniform a little less filthy, his face momentarily devoid of filth. And, with the obvious exception of the thick bandage wrapped around the top of his head, slightly lopsided, making it hard to cram on his helmet without causing distinct discomfort, he functioned the same too.

Still, weeks later, it hadn’t quite stopped - the _sting_. Not the outer skin-deep pain he’d initially focused on, but something … _deeper._ Like the gash was still open in his skull, despite the fact that the skin had temporarily healed over. There was a dull throb there, and though he’d been ensured the bleeding had stopped on the day of his treatment, there hadn’t been enough spare bandages to clean the wound and redress it. So now he was destined to wander about looking as if the hole in his head was still open under all that heavy white cloth. Like the brownish tinge staining most of it had been sustained recently.

Was it supposed to still be hurting? But he knew that was ridiculous. Of course it was. That stray piece of shrapnel had dug right along the side of his old helmet, carved a gash in it, dug in so deeply it went practically all the way through his skull, almost skid across the surface of his brain. But it hadn’t. He was still breathing, still functioning, still _thinking._ Somehow, impossibly, alive.

Fucking pointless, really, to obsess over it. Alive was alive was alive, and at the moment, it looked like he had a bit more time on his clock.

Three months ago, an injury sufficient enough to drag one away from the heat of the battle might have been a horror. And now … perhaps even the phrase “godsend” may not have entirely covered it. Yet here he was again, back for more. As if his previous bout hadn’t been enough. Like that non-existent god floating in a cloud overhead had decided he’d needed another dose of medication.

But there was no God floating in the clouds, not in Dean Winchester’s mind anyway. No, there was only dirt, and blood, and death – but fuck him if, having seen the carnage of it himself, he was to leave Benny (let alone the rest of his comrades) in the midst of it, to fight it out while he, Dean, lay moaning like a sissy on a stretcher, desperate to avoid the inevitable return.

Still, it was with the tight pinch of dread in his gut that he scrambled back down that muddy slope to the trenches, meandered his way through the constant flow of soldiers – dashing one way or another down the jagged gash of earth.

Dean nodded absently to himself, cast his eyes seriously away, scanning the river of indistinguishable helmets in some vain effort to find someone he knew, someone he so selfishly hoped had survived those three weeks – if only long enough to greet him one last time. It was then that these last struggles would really catch his eye – when he was alone, desperate to find someone.

Aloneness meant dread, but company – company was in some way frustrating. Like an abstract mockery of their own mortality.

And, most of the time, it was moments alone, when you’d just scrambled desperately back into the clutches of a trench after that stupid, near-suicidal _over the top_ command, that it would truly be impossible to ignore.

And their shrieks of pain muffled, single miniscule droplets of crimson sprinkled from between their lips as animalistic teeth bit own on those tongues in some ancient instinct to keep quiet. As if, if they quieted themselves, if they kept struggling and flailing back to the trench like a fish out of water, the hole blasted in their side wouldn’t matter. Nor would the dark liquid pouring from the place where that limb had once resided, or the deep gash through which white visibly glinted. The metallic stench of iron in their nostrils wouldn’t faze them. And, if they were shocked enough, maybe the pain wouldn’t either.

Dean wouldn’t know. He’d never been one of those poor, screaming bastards. He’d never cried here, never sobbed for his mommy the way a few of the others did – others who hadn’t even been injured, but simply couldn’t take it, sinking to their knees, on the duckboards that consisted the sopping floor of the trench, and wailing as if their life depended on it, shaking uncontrollably, as if they, in that moment, were being murdered, and not their comrades falling to bullets over the top.

Dean didn’t have a mommy, but he wasn’t altogether sure whether he’d be sobbing over her even if he did. And to hell if he’d ever call for his daddy. He most certainly didn’t fancy himself loosing his mind – no, he grit his teeth, as if attempting to force himself to remain sane would help. Maybe there was something wrong with him.

No, he’d just stood, and smoked, and watched. He just closed his eyes before every new order, new attack, pressed a clenched fist to his lips in an effort to swallow back the buzz of adrenaline and dread, his mother’s old ring cool against his skin. And then he would act.

At first, it seemed Dean had some innate survival instinct – hadn’t his grand old military Daddy been teaching him the tricks of the trade since he was ten? – but, usually, when the machine guns were faced down, the number of years training didn’t matter. Bullets didn’t pause to debate experience.

It was luck, and it was skill. It was mostly luck.

But if there was one thing that drove him, it was revulsion. He wanted it to be over. As did everyone else, at that. Probably including those faceless, destructive masks that were the Germans – lurking less than a hundred meters away from them. But Dean didn’t like to think of them like that – to humanize them in a way he figured there was no fucking way they deserved. Who the fuck cared who they were specifically? It was just so easy, really – to blame them, to generalize that one teeming mass of people into shadow of the bloody carnage they caused. As if each individual German soldier bore the blood of every ally ever shot down throughout the war.

So no, he didn’t consider those monsters – those fuckers who’d picked off those people he’d grown fond of, even loved, through intensity of their efforts to survive  - human. And they’d taken the people he loved. One by one. Dean had run out of fingers to count the lost on. And that excluded the absence of his father

 _M.I.A._ – simply vanished, wiped clean off the face of the Earth. Or perhaps … not so cleanly (but his gut twisted itself into a tight knot at the very thought of it, and he quickly expelled all notions of such things from his head … or at least made a weak attempt to. He couldn’t quite filter it out, not completely.

There were so many meanings for that, really. Missing in action could be so many things. Captured, or tortured, or abandoned the military, or left behind, or sheltered somewhere injured, or dashed across no man’s land … _No – fuck it, Dean, stop it_. He thought the order to himself with a sort of vigour he hadn’t been altogether sure he’d possessed.

For some reason, he’d gotten it into his head that the recovery of his father would be straightforwards, clean. After all, hadn’t that been what his father had so constantly boasted off – the consistentcy of the military? And that’s what they’d been told, really – those boys with frozen faces in the cracks in the mud. It would be done soon – the whole war, really.

And now, with the cold biting tigther against their skin, their toes freezing further, the stupidity of that notion was like a punch to the face.

 _“Home by Christmas”_. Home by Christmas – the mental calling only growing louder, higher, in desperation as it became more and more evident that there was no such chance of this. Until it was a mental scream, driving them to insanity with it. _Home by Christmas -_ oh, God, p _lease_. _I just want to be home by Christmas._

And it wasn’t even an announcement that caused the general, defeated aura of the place – it was the fact that the notion of it simply seemed impossible. Like the Germans would simultaneously cut off the violence for a day or two – _as fucking if._ It was the sort of unspoken declaration, a proclamation never voiced, yet felt internally by all who thought of it. _Home by Christmas._ What a fucking stupid thought.

So now, returned and quite sure the chance of escape wouldn’t arrive so conveniently again – unless, perhaps, provided in the form of a bullet hitting that mark it so desired, or a shrapnel lodged a bit more solidly in his head than the last – what the hell was he thinking?

He glanced about himself again with the thrum of nerves rising in the form of a wildly jittering throb at his throat, and the instinct to mask any inner emotion was an automatic function by now. He wasn’t sure if he’d expected some sort of difference – some miraculous event which had magically transformed the battlefield into something … _else._ Something, _anything_ , else. But no, of course it was the same. Three weeks hadn’t changed the world.

Nor had he truly expected it to. Still, it was a sort of disappointment nonetheless. In fact, it was if things had taken a purposeful turn for the worse – the weather and the violence included.

He could barely feel his feet – not the softness of the worn leather, nor the sharp sting of the cold. As if they’d been silenced, muted. A muted set of toes. He never would have imagined possessing such things. His time away from the wet, stowed away in the raucous of the infirmary, hadn’t fixed that – time didn’t heal a lot of things, apparently.

He glanced about him for a moment, at the pale, bloodied faces, and let the moans and labored gasps of the survivors bombard his ears, like the trench itself was breathing, struggling for life. Like the dirt itself was striving for some sort of escape. Maybe that’s why it was caving in, in places.

And he realized then, with a dull thud of some strange emotion mounting in his stomach – dread? Or perhaps something worse, the simple _lack_ of dread – that there was no point in thinking he never would have imagined having muted toes, or a heavy bandage wrapped around his head, or be so used to the sight of a dying boy by his feet that he merely strolled by without notice. He would never have imagined any of this – the devastation, the sheer wreckage of it.

The feeling like the whole world was caving in on itself, falling to hell.

Except – they were already in hell. And the whole thing got so equivocally overpowering in his mind that he simply shut his eyes, stopping thinking about it. What was he doing trying to think deep, anyway? He was a high school dropout, a moron at best. The thinking made his head hurt – a piercing headache sliding along his temple. Or perhaps that was just the injury.

He glanced for a moment up at the sky, tilted his head up to feel the cool spray of rain (more like pellets than droplets) sprinkle against his face. It was a cool, consistent gray – vast, indiscriminant, never ending. So level that at times that it became disorienting, hard to tell in which direction the enemy trench was supposedly dug sloppily into the earth.

Until the bullets started flying.

After the initial shock of it, one could determine the source of the murderers attempting to gank them pretty swiftly. Well, at least the men remaining could. Dean leaned up against the sopping wall of the trench, the stubby remains of his very last cigarette poised between his lips, contemplating it – that controversial theory Charles Darwin had come out with. Evolution in process. What more evidence of natural selection than this? And Dean didn’t even particularly like science – he’d been a _dropout_ , afterall. Still. Sammy had managed to drill some facts into his thick skull. Dammit - why hadn’t he listened to more of them? Opened his fucking ears for three seconds to the excited, rambling lectures of his little brother? He might die without ever knowing how electricity worked, or the theories of Freud his baby brother had been so excited about. He might die without Sammy every having opportune to explain something to him again.

“Winchester?”

The voice came at first slow, rough – drawn out by that southern drawl of his. And suddenly, so violently his feet momentarily parted contact with the ground, Dean was encased in a bear hug, the stench of unwashed clothing rank in his nose, but the sensation so goddamn welcome he didn’t care. Benny released him as roughly as he’d ensnared him.

His shoulder received a violent shove.

And the two men stood staring at each other for a long moment, Benny’s face a firm mask of observation, of disapproval. And, just like that, the smile cracked so wide across his face, his scruffy moustache was twitching all over. There had been no time to shave it, really, in the realm where every second felt surreal, filched. As if the impending explosives were merely doing their duty, deleting those who tempted fate, who’d stolen time.

“You lucky fucker,” Benny shook his head slowly, “You got out.”

“And now I’m back in.”

“What the hell’d you do that for?” Benny smirked the response. “Don’t you have a lick of sense?” Benny was still staring at him as if he’d dropped right out of the sky.

“Benny - _what_?”

“You’re – just Dean, you’re still fucking breathing.”

“Got all my limbs too,” Dean sent the green circles rolling in his eyes, waved an arm, yet there was a dominant note of pride in his voice.

And for a second Dean caught that sheer, relieved twinkle buried somewhere beneath the thick eyebrows, entangled in the strands of blue of his light irises. There was that fact, plain and simple, hanging between them like a physical force: because who the fuck got brought back from the infirmary? Usually, a venture there was a sort of permanent goodbye – either that was the moment the light faded in your eyes, a death on a stiff stretcher rather than the relentless earth, or you were so badly impaired you had to be sent home.

Dean tore his gaze away, glanced himself up and down, grinning more ecstatically than he had in weeks, in months perhaps. He didn’t know – it was just something about Benny, the reunited aura of it. Like, despite it all, something was endurable as long as he had the boy with the scruff and the southern drawl alongside him.

He wondered if Benny felt the same.

“I noticed.”

“I – how?” Benny shook his head, paling instantly, the smile slipping from his face as if it had been washed away by the rain. “That shrapnel – skid right along your helmet, made a big gash in it -”

“Well,” he chewed his lip, wincing slightly has he rearranged the protective shell of metal strapped over his head. “At least my helmet fits better – Benny, _look at me_. I’m _fine_.”

They grinned at each other for another second, each simply too stunned in their own delighted shock that the other had faired all right in their absence. It was only then that Dean realized how stiffly he’d been holding his breathe the time away. As if every moment he inhaled air not beside Benny, was the moment in which Benny might take his last huff. And he wouldn’t even be there. He tried to relax now, to knead that tight knot from his gut, but it wouldn’t go away. He ignored it.

He stumbled over something then – something heavy and soft that sent him sliding in the slick wetness of the duckboards. It took him a long while to tear his eyes away from Benny’s face, to bring his gaze slowly down, down to the perfectly still figure at his feet.

The red spilling over the tears of meaty flesh, the absence where the side of the face should have been … it rendered the boy utterly unrecognizable. Did he know him? Did he care about him … did it really matter anyway? He’d been away for three full weeks – might as well have been an eternity, for all familiar faces that simply no longer appeared as he strolled down the trenches, all the new ones that had replaced them. Anyone who still remained must have forgotten him by now, or merely concluded due to his lack of presence, that he’d been blown away at one point. And that was that. It wasn’t as if there was time to be curious.

A whole knew generation – as if he’d fallen asleep on that stretcher for fifty years, rather than those agonizing, pulse-spiking first days in which that lull of drug-induced quiet had been the closest thing to heaven.

Then there were the roaches, the survivors. The old, battle-hardened men. Like Benny.

But they were all dead anyway, essentially, bound to wind up like this … this bloody, gusty, indistinguishable mess. And he found himself doing something he’d sworn not to since his initial arrival to this hellhole, had forced himself to avoid until it became a habit, an impulse – he was looking, really _looking_ , at that mangled form. And worse, he was _wondering_.

A sudden wave of revulsion welled instinctively up inside him – he was stunned, for a moment, by the overpowering urge to be sick, but he swallowed the vile back. He couldn’t puke now – no. What was wrong with him? Three weeks ago, he wouldn’t have batted an eye. Three weeks and he’d become soft. He couldn’t be soft. He couldn’t. Not in front of the men – not any more experienced or physically capable than he, but somehow he felt as if there was a sort of expectance there. A general aura of needy reverence. Like they needed someone, something – _anything_ – tangible enough to cling to, to admire. Fuck if Dean knew why they’d chosen him, of all damp, red-splattered faces.

If only they’d know what he’d done – what he’d done to his brother. What he’d done to Jess. But they couldn’t know that, and he doubted they’d be fully able to comprehend it anyway. So he held it back.

“So how was it?” Benny’s voice pierced the dulled veil against reality that had formed for a second in Dean’s mind – he jumped slightly. Benny was peering into his eyes as if he hadn’t noticed anything in the slightest. Or maybe he was a bit concerned – but at that, he was glancing more steadily over the dully red-stained bandage, than at his dizzied face. “The infirmary.”

Dean looked at him for a second, then glanced away – towards the wall of the trench, beyond which he knew the enemy must be lurking in their own rat-infested hole. “… Different.”

“Quieter?” There was almost a hope about his voice then, as if was hoping he too might be so blessed with a blight just severe enough to get him away – anywhere but _here_.

Dean’s eyes snapped to Benny’s face at the abstract notion. Quiet. It hadn’t been quiet in months. It hadn’t been quiet since that last night, rolling over in bed, before he’d scrawled that eager, furious signature on the enrollment list.

“Fuck no,” he blurted out, bit his lip for a second in hesitation as he decided more slowly on the words, “It’s just … a different sound, I guess.” A different sound of hell. That about summed it up. And as an atheist … well, it almost proved his point, didn’t it? Because there was simply no way in the universe that there could possibly any demon-inflicted hell worse than this: what man did to man, without any divine intervention whatsoever. Unless, of course, it was some holy spirit deciding to rain that freezing repulsive gush of water every breathing moment, until mere breezes sent shivers down their spines, and the feeling had been almost entirely lost in the toes of his swamped boots, and the mud was so slick it threatened to cave inwards on top of them.

Fuck those angels, sitting on their clouds and sniggering.

And on the scale of things, the infirmary had been barely different at all from his particular cage of torment. Only there, the boom and the rattle of the shells had been dulled by distance. Only there, the emanating screams were caused by doctors, by desperate attempts to staunch those previously inflicted injuries, rather than by the faceless mass that was the enemy.

“Oh yeah,” Benny blurted it out suddenly, taking him by surprise as he reached into the depths of his large jacket, drawing out a small package. “Mail for you. I nabbed it.”

“I – what?” it took a moment for the foreign notion to settle properly in his mind. And suddenly he lurched forwards, snatched it eagerly. The only slightly yellowed paper appeared pristine, practically angelic, in contrast to the filth and grime that coated his palms and fingertips. Almost glowing, a magical beacon of - dare he think the word? – hope.

_Please be Sammy. Please be Dad._

And for a split second he was absolutely convinced it was.

He tore open the string attaching the letter to the package it lay atop. He turned it over in his palm, so it was face up. And then his face fell.

“What?” Benny’s gruff voice raised a note in surprise. “It’s not stamped, is it?”

“No,” Dean said quietly. No, it hadn’t been stamped – they both knew what that meant, really. That dreadful moment when the happiness faded from your face, the moment that kid with the overlarge helmet realized he hadn’t received a reply to a letter for a relative soldier, but merely the return of one he’d sent earlier. One stamped “ _dead_ ” in bolded, red letters. Because the army couldn’t afford to write out nice messages to all the relatives now, not at the rate the men were falling like dominoes on the battlefield.

“It’s not stamped.”

“What the fuck’s wrong then?” The obvious note of relief melted into his voice.

“It’s Jess.”

“Oh.” Benny hesitated for a second, “What’s that bitch want with you?”

“Hell if I know.” But he did, he really did. Because he’d been almost expecting this, this inevitable message of utter hatred. Deserved hatred, concerning what he’d done. To her _and_ to Sam.

He didn’t read the letter, just shoved it into an inner pocket of his overcoat, as if in a silent promise to read it later, alone, where passersby couldn’t lurk and glance of his shoulder to discover his deeds. If there was such a thing as “ _alone_ ” anymore.

He tore open the packaging with the rare crinkling of still-crisp paper. Something that hadn’t yet been soaked through. He slit through the cardboard box beneath with Benny’s hunting knife – deftly offered to him. Dean couldn’t find his, couldn’t imagine what happened to it, but at the moment his chest was thundering so loud he could barely hear himself think, because within the confines of the little box was a pair of socks. Warm, wool – blessedly soft. He made an attempt to wiggle his own muted toes and could barely feel them.

There was also a package of cigarettes and a single, fat, fancy cigar. There were no matches.

At first, his smile had been unquenchable – and then the reality of it sank into him. Now, with the rain that hadn’t subsided for a single moment in weeks spatting against his forehead, the bridge of his nose, sliding down his cheeks, like salt-less tears, it felt almost like a taunt. She’d meant well, he assumed, but the tight curl of muscle in his gut said differently. Next thing he knew, he’d tugged out that stupid, useless stick of a cigar, tossed it against the duckboards.

And just as quickly, Benny had swooped down to retrieve it. Desperately trying to dry it off in his already mottled, soaked hands and uniform. He seized a scrap of the paper wrapping from Dean’s hands, as if squeezing it with paper would somehow save it, absorb the water.

It was barely wet, really.

But Benny didn’t stop until he seemed to figure it was a dry as he could make it, and it as a moment before he handed it over, eyed it quietly. “… You gonna smoke it now?”

Dean stared for a moment, then pouted – the corners of his lips pulling prominently down – and rolled his shoulders. “Nah.”

“That’s the most motherfucking stupid thing I’ve ever heard.” Benny’s reaction was spat out without hesitation, the remnants of the southern drawl he’d never quite dropped in all those years of living in Alberta, slowing his pace. “It’ll get wet, or stolen, or fucked up. Smoke it now, man, or I will.”

“I’m saving it, you bastard.” In truth, he’d been a bit taken aback by the sudden malignance in Benny’s voice, the urgency to his tone. Dean lurched forwards, wrestled it out of Benny’s massive grip, slid the thing firmly into his pocket, wrapped in that paper packaging for protection. Initially Benny’s struggles had been forceful, difficult to overcome, but after a moment he laxed. Benny watched in silence as Dean hid it away, deftly offered his own box of matches for one of the smaller cigarettes Dean had plucked out of the package.

“Saving it for what?” Benny’s voice was scratchy. And it struck Dean as an odd question, for a moment. Celebration, obviously. But then – what was there to celebrate? What was left in the world that could possibly be worth smiling over? Then the answer was overtly simple: being alive. Surviving this long. Wouldn’t that be the only thing he had, really? Apart from a couple of new socks, and a scant letter from the last person in the universe he wanted correspondence from. It felt almost like mockery, then, the fact that survival was so futile he might as well smoke it now or not at all. That he might as well smoke it and then shoot himself, for all the difference it made to the world, to the war effort. They were supposed to be on some grand adventure, becoming heroes, not lurking in some muddy pit considering taking a last smoke before popping himself in the noggin. Still, he sighed. He made sure the package was safely tucked away, patted the pocket in reassurance.

He lit one of the cigarettes with Benny’s matches, deftly handing the small matchbox back, barely paying attention to where he’d tossed it, or if Benny had even caught it. No, his eyes were too glued to this little cigarette – just a roll of paper, and tobacco, and all matter of soothing substances. As if there was ever something that could calm his nerves now. It looked so tiny, really, in contrast to what he was saving.

He coughed before the cigarette could even meet his lips.

After a while, he glanced back up at his silent comrade, suddenly divulging -  “What the fuck are you even doing here anyway, Benny? You’re an American. Go the fuck home.”

“Thought you’d gotten bored of that label. Moved to Calgary when I was fourteen. Not on your life am I leaving, you wouldn’t last thirty seconds without me.”

“Yeah,” Dean was laughing, “You look away for thirty seconds and _this_ happens to me?” he indicated the heavy bandage with an eye-roll. “On the second thought -” he shook his head slowly, laughing. It felt heavy, “- you’d better stick around, you unpatriotic asshole.”

“I’m as patriotic as they come,” Benny snapped, yet the smile twisting slightly beneath his stubble was unmistakable. It faded a bit, as he once again glanced up at the gauze at Dean’s head, “So let’s go back to fighting for the free world, or whatever the fuck. But this time, lets not loose our heads.”

***

Darkness fell with a sort of slowness here, with a gradual taunting leisureliness. As if reminding them that the sky, unlike them, boasted a limitless amount of time.

It didn’t help that the pinkish hues were almost gorgeous. Not that Dean was really thinking like that anymore – it was difficult to value anything that vaguely resembled the colour of blood. Not when it was everywhere – and especially when it was washed out like that, all faded, like it had been sloshed around, diluted, the only remaining traces of the man it used to inhabit sinking ever so slowly into the slop of mud.

And, beyond the raucous of their own trench, Dean couldn’t help but find the enemy’s silence irritating, unnerving. And it was in the settling quiet that the first notes of a voice rose up among the coughs, and the groans. Strong, and high. It took Dean a long moment, a moment of standing and scowling and mulling, to recognize it: _Silent night._

He whipped his head around immediately, to target Benny with his customary _what the fuck_ look, but found to his surprise and utter horror that Benny’s jaw was moving in rhythm to it.

And all along the dirty hole, the boy’s voices rose in symphony, joining in.

“Is – Christmas soon?” his voice came out sort of quieter, cracked almost. He hadn’t spoken in a while. Benny merely rolled his eyes, nodded once, leaned up against the wall and smoked.

And then – something strange happened. Something so disconnected, Dean doubted for a moment it was real. Other voices had joined in – but too many, and too distantly for it to be really fathomable that it had emanating out of their own ditch. The notes were convuluded, the syllables impossible to understand and yet somehow managed to match the melody. Almost as if … but no.

This was what happened when he left for a few weeks? The men started fucking communicating – _singing_ of all things – with the enemy.

“Since when has _this_ been going on?” the hiss raked through his teeth, snapped out before he could fully comprehend it – but a moment later, he still did not regret it. What _was_ there to comprehend about this?

Benny sighed, leaning against the muddy slush of a trench wall, the moistness seeping through his jacket, soaking the green of his uniform a dark, brownish sort of stain. His helmet hung lopsidedly on his head, the cigar between his lips slurring his words slightly. “You missed a lot o’ shit at that med center, my friend.”

Dean felt himself stiffen at this – not a conscious movement, necessarily, but noticeable to him nonetheless. For a split second, the green irises trailed after the thin stream of smoke, watching it curl ever so slowly into the air, slowly dissipate into nothingness – as if from a freshly fired rifle. He tore his eyes away and fixed them firmly back on Benny, head feeling abnormally heavy.

“Yeah?” he snapped gruffly, jutting his finger in the Eastern direction of the enemy trench, just a hundred or so meters away. “What kind of shit? ‘Cause since when do goddamned Canadian soldiers sing with those animals over there?”

“Wow, your military daddy really drilled that into your head, didn’t he?”

“Don’t,” Dean snapped, the word sliding with sudden force between his teeth. “Benny -” he caught himself, cast his eyes up to meet Benny’s and held them there – green and blue unwavering for a moment, frozen. The only still thing in that field, “Benny – just don’t bring up my dad.”

“Didn’t mean no offence, Dean,” the drawl came out slow, raising his hands as if in surrender. He cast his eyes away, broke the gaze. And for a second there was a strange swoop in Dean’s gut – disapointment? “I don’t like to get in notbody’s business. It’s just that … you wouldn’t be here, if it wasn’t for him, would you?”

“… What?” The pause before he spoke was almost as thick as the word itself.

“Dean, your father -”

“Benny -”

“Dean, you gotta see here. It’s not as simple as your making it sound. If you find him -”

“ _If_?”

Benny sighed, shook his enormous bear-ish head once again. He’d lowered his hands and slipped them into his pockets. “… If or when you find him, you might not like the result. And even if he _is_ alright – Dean he’s not good for you.”

“Benny, shut the _fuck_ up about my father!” his voice hitched in the middle of the sentence, and he could feel a strange, creeping, trembling feeling coursing through him in time with the throb of his hearbeat.

“That son of a bitch could get you killed, Dean. You and Sam.”

“What the fuck are you saying -?”

“I’m _saying_ ,” he paused for a second to steady his voice, meet his eye. “I’m sayin’, Dean,  you should drop this crazy quest or obsession of yours, whatever the fuck it is.”

He piped up immediately, “I don’t have a quest - ”

“Yeah, you do,” his voice was thick as he cut him off. Huskier than usual, as if in slow caution of the very words slipping forth from his lips. “All you ever talk about – saving your daddy. They took your Daddy. I get that, Dean. God knows you’ve told me enough times – but you don’t even know for sure. For all we know, he’s dead. And you know what, Dean? If you haven’t noticed, he’s not the goddamned first!”

Dean opened his mouth, to say anything. To do anything. There was a strange, electified twitching going through him, exaggerated by the ache in his head and the back of his neck, the throb of his frustratedly pounding heart. He slipped his hands into his muddied pockets in order to stop Benny noticeing how tightly he’d clenched them – the knuckles gone all white from the stress – but he saw his companion’s gorgeous eyes trail after the movement and knew it was in vain.

Finally, the words slipped out, quaking. “Shut the fuck up, Benny.” Childish, even to his own ringing ears. Like something that barely belonged out of the playground, the most bare of plausible arugments. But what else was there to say? Benny was wrong. More wrong than he’d ever heard him – so wrong Dean could barely believe his ears, because really – how could Benny be that stupid. Of course he had to save his dad.

“Truth is, Dean,” Benny was shaking his head again – in such a pretentious way that Dean’s chest gave a sudden pulse, as if his heart was attempting to tear itself out of its bone prison in its desperate fury, to leap forth and attack. “You should leave this alone. Focus on saving your _own_ life. Focus on your brother. And if your Dad’s somwhere expecinting you to show up to the resuce – I hate to break it to you, Dean, but your Dad’s a selfish son of a bitch.”

“ _DON’T_!” It took a split second for him to locate the source of the strangled shout as his own mouth, his _own_ bloodied hands shoving Benny away from him,

Benny took an unsteady step backwards, bumped roughly against the precarious trench wall, narrowly avoiding a protrudring rock.

The sharp, dry aching in his throat, the pounding in his ears.  The stench filling his nostrils. He couldn’t think, couldn’t function, couldn’t reason – only the sudden flux of fury forcing its way red-hot through his veins. Why the fuck was so angry? Because he’d brought up his dad, because he’d brought up his _dad_. His dad, whom he hadn’t heard from. His dad, whose disappearance had triggered this whole goddamned thing, had dragged he and Sam into this mess headfirst.

And the wretchedness of this place, and the distant moans, the screams, the stench that brought bile up to his aching throat. And through it all, he forced the words out from between his teeth, practically spat them. “ _Don’t_ – talk about my father like that, you bastard.”

And suddenly his feet had slipped out from something, and his groping hands were clutching desperately at air – and his back hit the opposite side of the trench with a _squelch_ of flesh digging itself into mud. His teeth knocked painfully together at the jolt from his helmet at the base of his skull.

“Want another goddamned concussion?”

Dean squinted up through the blinding, icy cool air, barely distinguishing the outline of Benny’s roaring silhouette, before an enormous hand reached forth, seizing his shoulder and hauling him back to his feet. The man’s southern accent hissed in his ear, “‘Cause do that again and the Germans’ll have one less on their itinerary to shoot!” and shoved him away again.

They shared a glance, and it was so obvious he wasn’t serious, and yet now Dean could feel that slow creep of frustration, of sharp (if muffled) resentment in his veins.

And sudenly, there a a genuine sadness behind that blue, glossy sheild of his irisis. Something beyond the reflective layer, as his next words came quieter than he’d ever heard Benny speak in his life. “Just … be careful, Dean. You gotta let it go.”

“Fuck you, Benny.” He spat the words out – with more ice in them than he’d realized, than he’d fully intended. But now that they were out he didn’t find himself eager to retrieve them. There had been nothing jovial, friendly about it.

***

They weren’t so much bunks, as holes dug sloppingly into the sides of trenches. Slots in which to slide, shut your eyes, wrap yourself in your coat and pretend vainly that you were somewhere – anywhere – but here. Just for a few hours.

The Germans had been quiet today. And the mere realization was as if someone hadn’t solved the conflict, but merely as if some giant had loomed above them, brow frustrated at the noise – and cast his gigantic blanket over the lot of them, allies and enemies all at once. Anything to stifle the noise. Muffle the roar of those tiny toy-soldiers systematically murdering one another. So irritating, really.

Fuck what Benny thought – the thought of an unspoken, unsigned ceasefire was the most fucking ridiculous notion that had ever entered his mind. And he’d been faced with a lot.

And as he lay there, curled up in a shuddering desperation – an utterly insufficient effort – to keep himself warm, his mind floated back to Jess’s letter in his pocket – in his minds eye, heavy and burning, as if screaming: _open me, just fucking open me_. But still he didn’t move, because he didn’t want to think of Jess. No, there was only ever room to think of Sam and his father at moments like this, brief moments where he wasn’t exactly alone, but at least there was no one brushing their labored breathing down the back of his neck. No, he didn’t want to think of Jess. He wanted to think of … other things, anything really. Anything but the gnawing guilt he so knew he deserved.

So he let his mind wander. Not quite far back enough to be home – home seemed a strange fantasy world now, as if it was something he’d come up with one evening in his head but couldn’t quite wrap his thoughts around. But he thought far back enough – past his being reunited with Benny, past the infirmary, past the injury, past the trenches themselves. All the way back to that last night of peace – in that training camp in England. Where there’d been rampant disease, and barking officials commanding their every movement. But at least the tents had felt relatively solid, relatively safe.

He thought of the rations – revolting, yet so much better than the monkey brains he was forcing himself to swallow down now. He thought of the quiet – how lights out quite literally meant lights out, not explosions going off in the distance, no distant screaming even if your own trench remained untouched. He thought of the spirit of it, and the laughter, and the excitement.

He thought of Sam.

And that image, sustained somehow after what felt thousands of years apart, swelled in his mind as if he’d pulled some sort of invisible trigger. As if he’d filmed it somehow in his brain, kept it tightly encoded.

He’d given his kid of a brother a stern look in the eye that night, craning his head back a bit to see him better. “We’ll stick together, Sammy – you hear?” He’d punched his shoulder. “You’ll see – we’ll fight this out together. Side by side. The Winchesters versus the universe.” And they’d smiled at each other for a moment, Dean’s hand on Sam’s shoulder before he added as a sly aside, eyes darting up to meet his for a moment. “Can’t believe it took this long to convince you – you’ll see, you don’t need to be such a pussy - _Bitch_.”

Sammy had yanked his arm away with a joking forcefulness, gave him the lightest of shoves with his arms, pushing him away. “ _Jerk_.”

And they’d laughed. The two of them, in that darkened training ground, sneaking a smoke and some illegal alcohol after lights out, their fellow trainees snoring deeply in their tents. It was that sly, heart pounding feeling – breaking the rules like this, with the watchmen potentially lurking around the corners. But it was more the unity of it, and the feeling that it didn’t matter to them, Dean Winchester and his kid brother.  It didn’t matter that they’d be sorted into their regiments the next morning, it didn’t matter that this was the last day of training before being shipped off to war itself. They were ready, eager almost. The training had been easy – and if there was one fact jammed firmly into Dean Winchester’s thick skull, it was that the two of them could do anything. _The Winchesters versus the universe_.

The next morning was the last he’d seen of his brother.


	2. Live and Let Live

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For Dean, the struggle of the trenches is morphing into it's original routine, but there's something else troubling his mind. And, thought he doesn't know it, the moment when a German soldier musters the nerve to march across no-man's-land alone, is the one that will change his life forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter actually turned out longer than the first, though I can promise that it's faster paced. I hope you enjoy. Please leave tips/comments on anything you didn't like so I can keep it in mind for the following chapters!

**_Chapter 2: Live and Let Live_ **

It had been a moment of pure cluelessness for a few seconds, when their names were called at different times. When they were tugged smoothly apart, an invisible electric gash sliced in the air between them by the syllables escaping the officer’s lips. Different regiments. Different destinations. Different fates? No, _no_ – the word was screaming in his head, all he could think – _NO_! _You motherfucking bastard, thinking you can just to take my brother away from me!_ But it sank into him slowly then – of course they could, they could all along. It had never been he, Dean, who could call the shots. _Ever_ , of course. He didn’t know then where these vague, shit delusions of control came from, only that they were so very, very wrong. He’d promised Sam of their unity, yet he had no power over it at all.

Now, tucked away into his dent in the trench, his filthy makeshift bed, Dean scowled as the memory came to him, the mere thought of it contorting his features. But it in the end it was the exhaustion that won, and he was dragged away from his thoughts into the depths of sleep.

When he awoke several hours later – a bit startled by the thoroughness of his slumber – he’d turned is head and found it to be quite early. Just early enough the lighter, greyish tinge to come into the sky behind the clouds. Curiously, it was still quiet. Dean was too exhausted to really consider this – only that it was early, and silent, and that he had time to drop back into sleep. And he almost did, but then the thoughts that had plagued him the previous night swam back into focus, and his weary, exhausted eyes refused to shut.

A single lark soared by, a blackened speck against the ceaseless cloud cover. He wondered how fast it could fly. Sammy would know. How was it, that it was the younger of them – softer, less experienced – that knew all this shit?

At least Dean was decisive. Dean knew what was right. Dean – he didn’t need to think, contemplate the inner workings of the universe. He just acted. He was impulsive. He pretty much always made the right call. But this – he glanced about him for a second – how the hell was it that the first time he’d acted _wrong_ , was the time he’d screwed up so fucking terribly? Not just for himself – but for Sammy as well. His soft, patient little brother – in uniform. He couldn’t really imagine Sammy killing anything, let alone stepping impassively over the fatally wounded, as Dean did nowadays. No, Sammy would strive to hope, to help. Even when it was clear neither hope nor help was possible. Maybe that was what would get him killed.

Maybe he should have been a doctor. Maybe Dean should have left him back home, encouraged him to go to Stanford – or scrap that entire weasel-y lawyer shit and choose McGill for med school. Life would have been simpler, then. But then he thought back to the desperate screams, the futility of the doctors at the infirmary – how some of them, hardened from the sheer aura of the place, weren’t exactly gentle.

No, Sammy should never be a doctor. He should never need to see that. He should have gone to law school. Dean shook his head for a moment, reached up lightly to touch the bandage, shut his eyes as he took a long unsuccessful draught from his long-extinguished cigarette. Why the fuck hadn’t he let Sammy go to law school?

*

It had been to Dean’s surprise that, when he’d strode back into the training camp tent for the final time, he was to discover his younger brother simply sitting there, perched on his bunk as if he’d strolled right in. Maybe he had, what with the swift packing, and the assignment of equipment, and the general jostling mess of the place.

Dean didn’t ask. Sam was staring at the cement-block floor.

“Sam?”

Sam didn’t speak for a second, and Dean piped up immediately as he lingered by the front flap, “Listen, I’m sorry, Sammy. But – but man up, okay? I’ll see you by Christmas. We’re gonna find Dad.” He smiled at him cockily then, “You’ll see, home by Christmas.”

“Dean, I …” the congested, forced sound of his voice had Dean’s eyes darting up to his brother’s face again – and it was to his surprise (and utter confusion) that he saw how red he’d gone, the rims of his eyes pink and swollen.

“Sammy?” the word came out instantly. Without being fully conscious of what he was doing, he was vaguely aware that he’d taken his brother’s enormous shoulder under his palm and sat him down on his bunk. A little too roughly, a little too fast, but he was too busy scrunching up his brows in thought to really notice it. His own eyes were round enough that it was almost possible to see the green disks in their entirety. “You okay?” the question came out quiet, sounded stupid even in his own mind, yet he was at a loss for what else to say. Goddamned emotions.

“It’s just …” Sam turned his head purposefully away from him. “Dean, I can’t do this.”

“Hey, man – look at me – _look at me – hey_!” he resisted the urge to take his chin between his fingers and force his head to turn towards him. Instead he sat down beside him on the bunk, the mattress groaning underneath the combined weight of the gargantuan boy and his muscled, smaller brother. And it was with a disheartened lump in his throat, that Dean saw Sammy turn his head decisively away from him again, as if trying to prove some sort of point. He watched the shoulders give a small shake as he withheld a snivel, a hand raise up to wipe roughly at his face. “What the fuck do you mean you can’t do this? Do what?” He caught himself, slowed his pace and forced his tone into something quieter, “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I just …” he hesitated for a second, “Dean?”

“Uh, yeah?” he was a bit dumbfounded.

“Doesn’t it all feel a bit … _off_ to you? You know, _wrong_?”

Wrong? A pout tugged at the corners of his lips, contorting them, wishing he could follow what the hell his brother was saying. “What the fuck do you mean? What – like it’s disorganized, or shit?”

Dean’s face felt a bit hot – flustered. It had been forever since his brother had cried. Well – since his brother had openly cried, admitted it. He figured he cried over a matter of stupid shit – run over  squirrels, for fucks sake, or maybe sad movies? The truth was, he hadn’t seen his brother in a long, long while. Not since he’d signed up for school. Who the fuck knew what sort of sissy his brother had turned into?

“No.” And a sharper tone had crept into his Sam’s voice, catching him off guard. “That’s not what I meant – I mean,” he turned to him sharply, and it was suddenly visible how red he’d gone, the few drops of liquid bubbling at his eyes, streaming down his cheeks. His nose twitched; he wiped it with the stupid, monogrammed handkerchief Jess had gotten him. The one Dean had laughed at so hard when he’d first shown up one night at their little house and tugged Sam out of his little fantasy world for a second in order to explain Dad’s predicament to him.

Sam had wiped the sweat away from his forehead with that ugly thing. Now he had it poised between his fingertips as he squeezed the bridge of his nose, eyes crammed tightly shut, as if trying to fight off a migraine. He took a sharp intake of breath, sucking it in with a notable quake. “I mean, Dean. It’s wrong.” He looked up slowly then, removed the handkerchief from his face, turned his head so that their eyes met. Even now, his huge dark ones were swimming, red-rimmed, despite the fact that the tears had come to a halt as sudden as when they’d begun. Like a sudden hurricane, then dissipating into nothingness.

Dean stared at him, mouth slightly agape, “… Huh?”

Sam cleared his throat, taken off guard at the lack of response. “The _killing_ , Dean? Doesn’t that even _bother_ you?” It looked as if Sam could almost hear the childish whine coming into his own voice on the stressed syllables, but he was too desperate for his brother’s understanding to really care.

Dean blinked at him obliviously for a second longer. “The killing.”

“Yeah.”

“What killing?”

It was Sam’s turn to stare in confusion. “The killing, Dean … _all_ of it. You know – what the fuck are we training for? We’re training to _kill_ people, Dean.”

“That’s it?” Dean asked quietly. And then, suddenly, there was a smirk painted over his features.

He laughed – and there was a relieved raucousness to it, the laugh of a man who’d been expecting far worse. He got to his feet as he punched his brother on the shoulder, clapped his hands together after a second. “ _That’s it_?”

“I …” Sam’s jaw had drooped open a bit, gaping openly at him. He closed it after a second, gave his head a small shake, “They’re people, Dean.” And his voice was more indignant than it had been since his brother had shown up on his doorstep in the middle of the night all those weeks ago.

“They’re fucking _Germans_ , Sam. They started it.”

“No,” Sam shook his head, closing his eyes for a moment as if unable to handle the smirk on his brother’s face. “No, Dean. Don’t you follow politics at all?”

“… No?”

“Don’t you even know what you’re _fighting_ for?”

“Yeah, I’m fighting because those bastards took our father and I want him back! Not to mention my country.” He gave himself a rather satisfied grin. _There_. Indisputable logic.

“Dean …” the sighing condescension in that single syllable was infuriating, “You don’t get it …”

“Of course I get it,” he snapped, the relief on his face having dissipated in an instant, all traces of laughter obliterated. “We’re risking our necks, right? For our country. And for our Dad. And for li’l Belgium stuck there in between this whole mess. ‘

“You listen too much to propaganda.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? It’s not fucking propaganda that there’s a war!”

“But it _is_ propaganda that there’s a point to it!” And suddenly, Sam was on his feet as well – so fast he smashed his head on the beam of the canvas tent’s structure and cursed, hand flying up to his forehead after the _thunk_ of impact for a moment, but he ignored it quickly. “Listen, Dean,” his voice was quieter now – speedier and steadier, head bent to avoid another collision. “All you’re doing,” he was talking faster and faster, nodding as he made his point, “All you’re doing is jumping on the bandwagon.”

“Bullshit,” Dean snapped instantly. “You know what, Sam – fighting for this country – saving your own father – doesn’t that _matter_ to you?”

“Dean, continuing this war isn’t going to help save Dad!” and he was snapping back, now – voice elevated. “Killing more kids – how can you be his goddamned stupid? Dean – listen,” he caught himself, steadied his voice. “Dean, I wish we hadn’t come.” A false hope had filtered into his eyes, practically illuminating them, “Maybe – maybe we can still go …” But he faltered then, because he’d realized how profoundly stupid the notion was. There was no getting out, not now that they’d enrolled, that they were so far overseas and entangled in the system.

“You want to leave your own father to die out there on a battlefield?’ Dean’s voice came out slowly at first, cracked and quieter, and suddenly he was roaring, spittle flying up in his brother’s face, shouting at an accelerated pace, arm jutting out towards the entrance of the tent, a damning finger pointed towards the men milling about outside in the late morning sunshine. “ _Those_ men - _those_ _men_ – they’re out here to serve their country without a special invitation, okay? And it’s not like they’ve all got missing fathers either. But you, Sam – _you_ , I had to argue you for _weeks_ before you budged. Are you that much of a goddamned _coward_ you don’t even have the guts to find your own Dad? Or do you just feel too special with your fucking brilliant brain, or whatever shit? Fancy Standford boy too good for any of this?”

“I’m not going to stand there and shoot some innocent farm kid who got drafted into this mess!” Sam was louder, too – not shouting, really, but significantly closer to it. “I’m not gonna shoot some kid! They’re – they’re like us!”

“Like us,” Dean repeated flatly, wide green eyes zipping up and down his brother’s frame as if fully expecting him to announce that he was not, in fact, Sam, but another man in disguise. “What’re you doing here, Sammy?” and suddenly Dean’s voice was a near whisper. Like he could scarcely bare to spit the words out. He’d looked at him, and saw that there was something slow and vacant ( _defeat_?) creeping into his eyes. He took a step back from him. “What the fuck is wrong with you, anyway, that I had to talk you into this?”

“They’re not all monsters, Dean! You can’t just generalize and indiscriminatingly kill -”

“Who says I can’t?” Dean suddenly barked, his interjection louder than anything yet. “Who says I can’t, Sammy? Because you know what, they’re the fucking enemy. You don’t go sympathizing with your enemy! You know why? Because they’ll blow your fucking brains out! You’re gonna be a sissy, you won’t be any help.” He finished sort of lamely, in contrast to the fervent of a couple sentences previously. Yet still those final words hung between them like a veil.

“Dean,” he shook his head again, and that horrible congested quality to it was back, “Dean – I just _can’t_ -”

“Sam,” he cut him off brusquely, more force than he realized he had, “Finish your first fucking term, and then - just run your sissy ass back home.” And then he’d turned on his heel and marched out of his own fucking tent, anything to be away from him shame of a little brother, with his stupid pretentious aura, and bullshit political points. As if he knew any better. As if he, Dean, was the one with his priorities screwed up. And Sammy – he was the one trying to bail on his own father to get back to his nice little school, cozy up with his stupid little girlfriend. So who the fuck was _he_ to call Dean selfish?

Those were the last words he’d spoken to his brother – aloud, or in scrawled print. He hadn’t heard from him in months. He wondered idly for a moment if they told your family when you were injured – or if they saved the message for when you were inevitably dead.

He wondered - if they told Sam, would he come? Would he have even desired to meet this miserable failure of a brother in his last moments – even if they would let him? No, either way Sammy was needed. Needed on the front lines. Needed so they could watch his body cripple, stunned, and broken, slipping back in the mud, figure curled on the ground with an agonized moan, at the shock of a bullet. They needed those men, so they had someone to die.

And those long-faded words lingered with him now, as if scrawled in the soft folds of his brain. Their sticky residue still coating his tongue. What he’d said … coupled with the notion that he, Dean, had convinced him to sign up for this bullshit battle in the first place.

I’m sorry, Sam. I’m so, _so_ sorry.

Goddamn, he’d better be alive. He’d better be – Dean wasn’t sure what he’d do with himself if he weren’t. He should have known – his gentle baby brother. He wasn’t built for this, despite whatever size he grew to. He had a mind for knowledge and a curious thirst for it – the sort of man who’d change the world using his head, rather than a gun. But now he might never even get the chance.

And there hadn’t been a point to it anyway – they’d been separated. No noble, united quest for the Winchester brothers. Maybe Sam was all right, maybe not. Maybe he was even in a situation where he’d heard something from their Dad. Perhaps not. Either way, Dean felt strange about it – like he’d skipped his best friends birthday party or some shit like that. Like he was left alone. Like …

There was nothing really to compare it to.

No, mostly it felt like there was a hole blown through his middle. Clean, sharp, and piercing. Not unlike the pain in his head as it had first been (Now that was muddled and dulled to a throb. This was consistently sharp). He’d thought such a feeling would only occur at someone’s death – Benny’s, Sammy’s, Dad’s _…_ But he stopped himself short, because he couldn’t bare to think of any of these obvious possibilities. And it now that he realized it was just the mere guilt of it, the fact that the probability was so high … Hell, Sammy could turn out just like that last German he’d cut up and he, Dean, would be none the wiser. They’d probably send that letter home, not to Dean anyway.

That’s what was tearing him apart.

*

“Dean?” a hand was shaking his shoulder, had reached into his slit in the side of the trench and met clumsily against his rough jacket. “Dean, buddy, you okay?”

“I -” He hadn’t been aware that at one point, maybe as quick as he’d blinked during his mulling over of what had occurred, he’d passed right out, given into the exhaustion. Now, he blinked furiously to battle it – found, strangely, that he wasn’t utterly fatigued anymore. Had some energy, at least, if not a lot.

“Hate to interrupt a restful sleep – but wasn’t sounding so peaceful by the sound of it. You were talking to yourself.”

He was vaguely aware that there was something Benny had said – or done? Hadn’t they been utterly furious with one another the evening before? Or at least Dean had been. He breathed out, trying to clear this throat. His head was hotter, heavier than ever. Fuck if he could remember their bickering.

But then, after a moment’s strained focus, he did. He could conjure it up in his mind then – the reason he’d been so infuriated. How Benny had mentioned is dad, insulted him. And Dean – it had been he, _Dean_ ,who’d shoved Benny, shoved him hard enough to bump him into the wall. Now, watching the bear of a man standing before him like some massive gentle giant, he couldn’t quite comprehend what had driven him to do so. Goddamn – who the fuck cared what he said, he was _Benny_. Irreplaceable, despite how stupid he may be about some things. Benny – the only one who hadn’t so far disappointed him. And he wasn’t about to ruin the streak by counting their argument as a disappointment. It wasn’t as if Benny had _done_ anything, just snapped at him. And even then … it had been for Dean’s own well-being, in Benny’s mind at least. It wasn’t as if he could hate him for caring, right?

“What time is it?”

“I dunno,” Benny checked the tarnished silver pocket watch he kept at his belt – only to seem to recall it had long ago stopped working, and dropped it back down, dangling, “I dunno, but morning. Late.”

“Late?” Dean sat up so quickly he forgot where he was – and his head didn’t so much smack against the top of his little bunk, as _squish_ right into it. He yanked his head back down, and his helmet left a round dent, came out with a slurping noise. The region beneath the bandage gave a cruel, jolting lurch of pain.

And then it took Dean a second to fully appreciate what was so off, so _wrong_ about this picture. Because when was the last time he’d slept late in a trench? … Not once, now he considered it. Not once since Halifax, even.

“There’s no – shells? In the morning?” he blinked about, bleary eyed, sure for the longest moment that he’d gone deaf. Surely, somewhere close, the bombs must be going off by now? But no – it was just silent. Just the shuffling of feet, the light patter of a drizzle, and subdued voices. There were barely even moans. For one insane second, Dean was convinced he was dead.

“No,” Benny’s gruff voice dragged him back to reality. “No, there’re no shells, Winchester. Haven’t been for a week or two, now.”

“A _week or two_?” he choked on the words, coughed and spat it out. His head was feeling a bit heavy, his heart pulsing hot and dizzying, though he had yet to move. “But _yesterday_ …”

“Yeah,” he admitted in his slow drawl, “Yeah, a bit in the afternoons. But, _hell_ , Dean. That’s the worst we’ve gotten pretty much since that fight where you got your head blown open.” Dean snorted at that, but Benny continued swiftly, as if to staunch any sarcastic comments that may arise. “We’re guessing their commanders were getting bored shitless from their apathy, you know? Ordered a strike, but mostly … well, mostly we’ve been getting along fine.”

“Getting along fine?” he craned his neck to get a better look at him. “Well how the fuck do you know that was only temporary?”

“We’ve had some … communication – don’t be spreading this, you hear?” He caught himself. “Listen, they don’t want their boys dying anymore than we do, and all we know for sure that this shelling shit isn’t helping anyone – hey, why you so pale, soldier? You okay?”

“Yeah, fuck, I’m _fine._ ” He shook his head for a second. “Why …” he peered at him, eyes itching with exhaustion. He heaved himself out of his hole in the side of the trench, practically rolled out onto the muddy duckboards, but caught himself at the last second. Benny hauled him properly to his feet. “What the fuck’s going on?”

“It’s sort of … an unofficial armistice or something. You know … live and let live.”

There was a long pause, then. And then Dean spat the words like he’d never heard them before, “ _Live and let live_?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s …” but he found that he was at total and utter loss. He didn’t know what that was. Only that less death was generally a good thing. “Well, how the fuck do you know you can rely on them, Benny? ‘Cause yesterday – yesterday was a shithole.”

 “I think …” Benny shook his head for a second, reached a hand forwards to Dean’s shoulder as it to steady him, but Dean jerked it off, twitched at the contact like a nervous rat. “Well, like I said. Nobody really wants their boys dead. The military don’t like not having enough soldiers left over to even celebrate a victory.”

*

Dean soon found that when there was no conflict occurring, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself. He smoked, he talked with Benny. They leaned against the trench walls and laughed. They were lucky here – these particular trenches were especially deep. They weren’t at risk of getting their heads shot off simply by standing up straight. And they took good advantage of it. All Dean really wanted now was … a beer. A nice, old-fashioned beer, preferably chilled. No, not just that. He wanted enough to get a buzz from it – something to dull his senses, make him forget. He wanted to get shit-faced drunk, actually. [U1] There wasn’t really a better way in his mind to put it. Something to make him forget the pain and the ever-present anxiety. To take advantage of these few moments of peace. But of course, it was forbidden. He didn’t know if anyone had managed to smuggle any in, anyway, and he wasn’t about to go asking around.

Such an endeavor might have been acceptable - well worth the risk - had he not been so well known. Dean didn’t know when  it had happened, really, but at one point or another his name seemed to have caught on. Perhaps it was the mere factor of his survival. People were puzzled by it, naturally. Having heard of him, eager to know his secret. Now, Dean could barely last an hour of peace without some kid scampering up eagerly to talk to him, appearing so stunning when he responded that Dean wondered for a second how aloof he actually was.

“Is it true, Winchester? How badly you fucked up that German before you got hit?”

“It wasn’t that exciting,” Dean shrugged, “He jumped me. Fucking monster came at me with a bayonet. So I knocked it out of his hands and then - ” he hesitated for a second, smirked, “He’s not going to be shooting anymore kids anytime soon.”

“I’ve never killed a German, not up close before.”

“Hope you don’t have to, kid. It’s sorta a mess.” But the truth was, he’d sort of lost it. Not quite as noble an act as they’d like to think.

            He hadn’t noticed how many people had wandered over, clumping to listen to him.

He could feel it then – that vague aura of reliance, of adoration, returning. Creeping over him in a wave, engulfing him in a sea of stupid fantasies. Because, for some reason, people seemed to take Dean as the Ideal Soldier type – brave and noble, and with an attitude, not to mention that filthy look of disgust on his face when he spoke of the enemy, the seeming decisiveness of his actions.

_Didn’t you hear? Dean Winchester is a hero. Saved dozens of men. Then when he got that brutal injury – they say he sliced his head so deep they saw brain! – he just came right back. To save us all. Nothing will come between him and war effort, that Dean Winchester. Say he’s out to avenge the Germans or something. He’s gonna win this war with us, boys. Oh yes, he is. We’re gonna win it with men like Dean Winchester at our side._

And it was, all of it, complete bullshit.

Because Dean was not a hero. He wasn’t even sure there was even such a thing as a war hero. No, there were just a bunch of bloody boys reluctantly doing their jobs. And it was only now, all these months later, that Sammy’s comments were beginning to make sense to him, piece themselves more solidly together in his brain like a jigsaw puzzle. He’d been right, really – those German boys he’d shot were just that: boys. With mothers and fathers, and sweethearts, and siblings, and hopes and dreams … And he, Dean, had taken it from them. All of it, wiped them clean (or maybe not so cleanly) off the chessboard. Like it was all one big game. What did it matter, anyway? It wasn’t as if they’d do any different to him, They’d started it, fucking fiends.

There was a sudden scuffle as someone shoved their way to the center of the crowd towards him, ordering a private out of the way. Soon, a mud-splattered figure had made himself visible, standing before Dean, recognizable only due to the light wisps of curly brown hair swirling out from beneath his helmet. No one had had a proper hair cut in months.

“Hey, Chuck.”

Chuck scowled at this for a second – and the movement dislodged a layer of dried mud coating his face, etching creases. He cleared his throat uncomfortably; muck flying right out of his mouth as if he’d swallowed it. But the gesture was more out of irritation than personal health, apparently, because the nervous way the eyes scrunched as he glanced Dean up and down betrayed his anxiety, as per usual.

“It’s – nice to have you back, Winchester.”

            “Yeah,” Benny barked suddenly, the interjected cutting between Dean and Chuck like a physical force, a swishing knife blade through the air. He ignored Dean’s widened, warning look, having seized both of their attention hostage. “But not so nice for _him_ , eh?”

            “Watch your tone, private.[U2] ” Chuck’s voice wavered a decibel as he ordered it, and for a split second their eyes met. “Don’t want to, ah, get into a – dispute.” And it was obvious from the way Chuck’s eyes widened for a second that he was not altogether sure he’d come out victorious (despite his rank) in such a conflict. He cleared his throat again, “Well, anyway. I think everything’s in order … just coming to see what all the goddamn fuss was about …”

            And he turned purposefully on his heel, marched off as if he could think of something important or sophisticated he needed o be doing. This, they all knew, was bullshit – a waste of a façade. In quiet times, minor officers like Chuck didn’t have anything more to do than they did.

Benny shook his head, muttered gruffly, “How that guy got to be an lieutenant before you, I’ll never know.”

            “Aw, leave the man alone, Benny. He’s a good guy, just a bit …”

            “… Sissy?”

            “Well he’s not gonna be getting up and charging any Germans, that’s for sure.”

            “Some _great_ leader, he is.”

            “Yeah, well right now the truth is we don’t really need a leader. All we need is someone to break the tension.”

            “Well - ” Benny smirked for a second as he watched Chuck slip up and skid across the duckboards until he keeled straight into a rather stunned, stuttering private. “At least he does one thing right, then.”

Dean laughed, watching Chuck disentangle himself from the highly confused boy and scamper off, muttering startled apologies.

He was strictly forbidden from referring to Chuck by this first name, he knew, but somehow he couldn’t help it. There were very few boundaries he could push here and survive; screwing with Chuck was one of them.

They were fortunate, really, to have him – despite how Benny rolled his eyes at the weak commands. Dean had heard of some of the other, far stricter commanding officials scattered throughout the trenches – the kind that didn’t take any bullshit or cowardice in the least. One particular horror story that had reached his ears, was when some shaky kid had simply refused to go over the top one day – to attack (and run straight into range of machine gun fire) – and the lieutenant had pulled his gun on him, aimed it steadily at the boy’s forehead and commanded him a second time to go forth, as the screaming of their comrades grew louder and more panicked. That kid had just stood there, frozen, scared out of his wits. And then he’d been shot dead.

Apparently, it had been reported as an errant bullet - enemy fire.

And Dean wondered, just for a moment, would Chuck really do it? No … no, this was _Chuck_. He knew the man by his first name, for crying out loud (not that the men would ever address the lieutenant as such in front of anyone of particular significance). Chuck wouldn’t shoot anyone – he barely had the guts to shoot a German, let alone one of his own, a _kid_ for god sake.

There was that dull, vague knowledge throughout the trenches that if they went around asking everyone’s ages, they’d be forced to send a third of them home. And the military couldn’t precisely afford to do so. So the officers kept quiet.

And those kids – initially beaming like they’d slipped through at first, like it was one massive secret only they knew – they were even quieter than the older men, now. So subdued – and that was if they’d survived that long. There were very few who’d managed it, mostly by luck or by the sheer tininess of them. One of these lucky ones was Little Ben

            Dean had asked him about it once – Why the fuck did you do it, kid? Lie about your age on paper, I mean, sneak in? Hell, most of us just want to get the fuck out of this mess _._ And Little Ben had merely shrugged those obviously young shoulders of his, the grimace like a permanent tattoo across his face. He’d mumbled something about wanting to fight, about wanting to have an adventure – not expecting this, no one had. And when Dean had pushed him further – _What the fuck were you thinking, though?_ – Little Ben had looked close to breaking point, as if he might snap and burst into tears at any moment. He’d mumbled something about supporting his mother Lisa, but Dean had caught him off, with simple defeated shake of the head. He didn’t know why he was getting on the kids case, really. He was so fond of him, and yet … maybe it was because Little Ben reminded him so much of his younger self. And that they’d made the same mistake. Except, Dean – he’d dragged his brother down with him.

Little Ben had merely turned his big eyes towards him and finally asked, “Well, why’d _you_ join, then?” And that had stopped Dean short. He wasn’t about to traumatize the kid further, get into a fight about it with him. And besides, he was practically old enough to be the kid’s uncle. How old was Ben, anyway? Fourteen? Fifteen? There was no way he could be older than sixteen, by the look of him.

            Dean was quite accustomed to running into Little Ben right now, and they’d become reasonably friendly. Somehow lately, that kid had managed to square himself down to two emotions – stunned, and occasionally snickering. Today, there was something else painted on his face and it took Dean a moment to place it. He’d never seen Little Ben confused before. There was never really anything to be confused about.

“There’s – there’s some German guy coming right across no-man’s-land.”

            Dean stared at him for a second, taken aback. Beside him, Benny gave a nervous grimace of curiousity. “Uh … So what the fuck is everyone waiting for?” Dean’s voice came out slowly, “Shoot him up!”

            “We can’t, Dean.”

            “ _Can’t_?”

            “He’s got his hands up, see? Didn’t even bring a gun.”

            At this, Dean wanted to shout, “So?” to snap them all out of it, but instead it was the more logical approach that managed its way through whatever filter he had, “How do you know he’s not a spy? Could have a pistol hidden, anyway.”

            “We don’t, but …” Little Ben looked desperately up at him, “Dean, we can’t shoot him. He doesn’t have a gun.”

            _For God’s sake_ , he was like a broken record, that kid. But then, as Dean progressed further down the trench, turned a sharp corner, he was taken aback by the sheer number of men clumping there, arguing in hushed voices. What was the dispute - did they not comprehend the danger a single pistol could contain? Perhaps, Dean realized, they were so used to the devastation of larger weapons, so well adapted, that they didn’t even preceive the risk of a smaller weapon as anything to worry about. They had survived machine guns, after all. Besides, no one kept weapons like that – the only thing distributed to the soldiers on either side, it seemed, were knives and bayonets. What were the odds the German had managed to attain a handgun?

            “Hold this a sec?” he turned to Benny, bestowed upon him his clunky gun, so he could clamber more easily up the side of the trench, just high enough to peer over it, get a better look. There, sure enough, squelching steadily towards them through the mud of no-man’s-land, was a pale man in German uniform. It was true; it seemed from this vantage point that the man didn’t even have a gun. Dean squinted at his face for a while.

“Someone pissed him off.”

“Like, maddened rage pissed off? Or just irritated pissed off?”

“Pissed off enough to walk across no-man’s-land, I guess. Weird,” he hesitated. “I dunno – but shit, Benny, he’s serious.”

            Benny, who was a significant couple inches taller, barely had to stand on his toes to attain the line of sight Dean was struggling for. “How do you know? He’s too far away to tell, really.”

            “I dunno,” Dean shrugged, almost loosing his balance. “Just from the way he’s walking, I guess – what do you think he wants?”

            “Could be a spy?” Benny echoed Dean’s previous thought.

Dean frowned to himself. “I go up there with a gun, and I bet you that German trench will blow me away. Bet they’re waiting for us to make the first move?”

            “Sounds like a stupid plan, you ask me,” Benny muttered gruffly back. “Practically sacrificing one of their own, sending him out here.” He hesitated, “… Maybe it’s a test? Maybe we should … I dunno, _talk_?”

“Test for what? Our patience?” he snapped. Dean hated tests – never been good at memorizing shit, didn’t like the pressure of it. But mostly he’d hated those testing him – like that teacher sitting smirking at the front of a classroom, that shit look on her face as if saying, “Ha – watch that little fucker struggle”, refusing to aid him in the slightest. It was almost a feeling of powerlessness, and especially idiocy. And roll his eyes at brains like Sammy as he did, he couldn’t help but get that competitive twinge in his gut – he had to pass, he had to win. So he’d devoted his effort into winning things he’d actually found some fascination with, rammed tests and studies to the abandoned back corners of his mind. But this was one test he wasn’t going to fail.

            Without really being aware of what he was doing, he heard the squelch of cloth on mud, felt the thick cool soil moistening against his uniform and his skin, heard Benny’s warning hiss of, “Dean, what the fuck? Get back!” but he was already over the top. He got to his feet slowly, boots sinking into no-man’s-land as if it was making an attempt to swallow him whole.

            The German, closer now, didn’t say anything. Ignoring the startled gasps, curses, and whispers issued behind him like echoes in some darkened cave, he stepped forwards – further, further. Just far enough that he could still scramble back in a few moments if need be, but certainly farther than he’d ever wished to venture again.

            The man came to a stop a few feet before him – close enough to see the pallor of his skin, the dark matted curls of hair swirling out from beneath the depths of the helmet, the wide nose, the tinge of blue eyes still pitched in shadow. The silence stretched on.

            The ground gave a repulsive squish beneath Dean’s feet as he fidgeted, as if it was still attempting to swallow him – encase him, drowning in muck, before the German could even touch him. A sound scratched his throat, bubbled roughly to his lips. Dean hadn’t been altogether sure he was speaking until the sound of his own voice punctuated that simple silent shield growing between them. “Hey.”

            At this, the German tilted his head – the point of the helmet caught the dim light filtering through the clouds above, reflecting painfully into Dean for a second. His lips contorted for a grimace for a second, blinking it out.

            And, out of nowhere, the man’s hand flew to his own side – the hilt of a knife glinting at his belt.

            Dean thought for a moment as if he’d shouted something, but no sound had escaped his chapped lips. A sudden jolt went through him, a throb so abrupt it was if his head was to escape through his throat. His hand lurched to his belt and found – _air_. He glanced down, overcome with a frantic grope at the empty air where his knife had been – gone, _gone._ His knife was gone. He’d forgotten he’d lost it. The German smirked in a way that made him want to throw away any notions of formality or caution – made him want to lunge at him and pummel every inch of him with his bare fists. And all the while screaming, _where’s my father you bastards_? Crush their heads into the muck, split them open with a rock, much the way they’d done to him … _Where’s my father_? And for some reason in this little fantasy of his, they’d tell him. But it was just that – a fantasy. And with that final thought, his consciousness crashed back down to Earth, and he was suddenly so very, very aware that he was a single soldier in no-man’s-land, face to face with one of the enemy, perfectly in range of the guns within the enemy trench, without so much as a weapon to protect himself. And also, that he was a complete and utter moron.

            “I …” he gazed down at his empty hand, a red warmth flooding his face. Slowly, he raised his eyes back up again to meet the German’s and knew in that instant: He’d blown it. Oh God, he’d blown it – three seconds into contact and he’d already messed up, displayed not only his own weakness, but his own capacity for violence.[U3] 

He thought for a moment, had he been in the shoes of the monster before him, what would he have done? If he saw the enemy a few feet in front of him lurch for a knife. Once he’d got past the simple euphoria that the weapon was there, that he was still mercifully alive for the next few moments … No, if it had been Dean standing there, he would have been thinking - Screw the men in the British trench. If this soldier was violent, so would the rest of them – if Dean had been stupid to go so close to the enemy trench, he probably wouldn’t be expecting to stride back proudly – no, he’d figure it unlikely he’d be breathing, thinking, functioning, long enough to do so. So he’d probably panic, wouldn’t he? The German hadn’t come with a gun (though Dean would have) but he could still stab him – and that’s precisely what Dean would have done.

So Dean gazed at that man in front of him and felt a lurch in his gut. He was dead, so dead. In just a few second, he’d be one of those screaming animals falling back into the ditch behind him. He wondered if he’d still be breathing when he hit the ground. He wanted to shout, to scream, only that sounded cowardly and the last thing he could do was spend his last moments bawling like a child, let alone in front of the men … and then, and then -

“It is no matter,” the man said abruptly. He gazed at him openly, his mouth slightly agape, head tilted, his eyes searching for a moment. Then, he reached up, pulled the pointed helmet from the matted wisps of hair. As he shook his head as if relishing the freedom of it – and his hair slowly sprung up, loosely, a messy tangle freed atop his figure.

He slid a hand easily into his pocket, regarded Dean steadily through the tinge of blue eyes still thrown into shadow by the rim of his helmet.

Dean watched him in silence for a moment, could take it no longer. “Uh …”

The man reached forth suddenly and Dean lurched automatically back, but the man only offered a cigar. It looked for a second as he wanted to speak, but stopped himself and closed his silvery blue eyes for a moment. When he finally spoke, his tone was flat, almost robotic. The emotion lost somewhere in translation into English. “Merry Christmas.” His accent was okay, really. Not very harsh at all, like he was well practiced at it.

Dean took the cigar. “… And a happy new year.” He placed it cautiously in his mouth, not quite firmly, but just stably enough to keep it there – as if gripped by the stupid fear that it was secretly a grenade, could explode out into his mouth at any moment, splatter the men behind them with fragments of his brains, obliterated for good.

The German watched him place it there, grinned a bit at that. He reached for a moment into his jacket and for a paralyzing second Dean was gripped by the urge to leap back, sure it was a knife, but it was only a matchbox. He lit one, gestured to Dean as if in offering help. And suddenly Dean knew what sort of response he wanted – but he was even more surprised with himself to find that he, Prince of Patriotism, was playing along.

Ever so slowly, he leaned forwards, poising his lips and teeth so that the cigar pointed outward, in the stranger’s direction. The German lit it with the same match he then used for his own. Dean straightened, huffed it for a moment, head feeling heavier than ever (though he refused to show it). It was nice, too. Not as fancy a brand as the one Jess had sent him (still tucked protectively in his pocket, kept a firm secret between he and Benny) yet still notably crisp, sharp on his breath, pleasant against his tongue. He exhaled through his nose and the smoke billowed downwards, the ghost of a waterfall.

Dean didn’t lift his eyes from the German. And really, up close, they didn’t seem so different – he and Dean. And for a moment the two men merely stood there, staring at one another. He could feel the sear of his comrades’ eyes burning their reprimands into the back of his neck. It made the hairs stand all on end there, nerves at this – or simply the pounding blood coursing through his ears as he steadily examined the icy blue eyes of the enemy. Closer now, than any relatively peaceful German had ever been. Almost as close as he’d been with that last boy, when he’d just lost it and cut him up – right before that piece of shrapnel caught him in the head, and Benny practically dragged him back to their trench. Certainly, closer than he wanted to ever seen them again.      

“… Thank you.” The gruff words came slowly, really – so slowly they practically scratched his throat.

“You are …” the German scrunched up his brows in frustration, tilted his head almost annoyingly to the side as he translated, “… welcome.”

Dean stood there for a second, expecting the German to turn on his heel and leave, squish back to the muddy hole from whence he came, his gesture complete. But the man didn’t move, simply stood there, gazing him up and down, filling Dean with a slightly sick urge to step away – cowardice – but he couldn’t help it. Standing there and being examined gave him the feeling of a lab rat, or a surgical experiment – or worse, some poor bastard back at the infirmary. He didn’t want to be reminded of that. He closed his eyes for a moment, slowly exhaled. When he opened them, the German was still staring.

He cleared his throat uncomfortably. His voice came out gruff, “Who’re you, anyway?”

“Private Cassidy Engel,” the man nodded brusquely. “I am … pleased to meet you.” Once again, any intended emotion of the statement was lost in translation – if there had been any to begin with.

“You too, sweetheart.” Dean smirked at him for a second, one corner of his mouth twisting upwards with it.

            “I …” the German, Cassidy Engel, hesitated, mulling over that last word, “… do not understand.”

            Dean ignored this, swung out a callused hand towards him, “Private Dean Winchester, pleased to meet you as well.” And as the fake smile plastered itself across his features, his eyes searched the man, peered right back into the blue ones, struggling to derive what the fuck was going on behind them, what sort of German thoughts were swirling through that brain of his. What, really, did he want? “That name of yours – Cassidy?” he smirked, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but it doesn’t sound all to much – you know – _German_.”

            At this, a small smile contorted Cassidy Engel’s face – he thought for a moment in translation, and then replied in what had been reduced to a monotone (as Dean now expected). “Yes, this is correct … Dean. My mother is …” he scowled for a second, closed his eyes in thought, as if straining to remember, **“** was one of the – Englisch.”

            “ _English_?” Dean offered blankly.

            Cas reopened his eyes, nodded in conformation, looked relieved at having found the word. “Yes – that is the location. You may call me Cas.”

            “Uh … okay,” Dean glanced him up and down, took in the slim figure – smaller than he, yet as fit as any soldier on the battlefield. There was a firm line to his jaw beneath the muck, and there was something stiff about his face, an innerving clearness to his blue eyes. Bluer than Benny’s, sharper than any eyes he’d ever seen. “You can call me Dean, then.”

            “It is good to know you.”

            “You too … uh, sorry but – just want to know – why the fuck are you here exactly?”

The grin faltered a bit once the words had processed their translation through his mind. “I was … the unlucky one, you say? We gambled who could go across, but no one would in the end. They dared me. So here I am.”

            “A dare?” Dean blinked.

            “Yes. I was … curious. No one was shooting. It seemed the logical time to go across.”

            “Are you an idiot?” he spat out suddenly, “We almost shot you to hell.”

            A nervous cringe crept into his voice then, “I … had some faith, Dean. And …” he glanced anxiously past him then, towards the ditch in the ground – now teeming with curious faces, overhear what on Earth the famous Dean Winchester could possibly be discussing with a _German_. “I thought … perhaps I wanted to see who I was fighting?” He spoke it like a question, despite the stiffness of translation, almost robotic. Something twisted in Dean’s gut – _false_. Fake. How stupid did this German think he was – believing this shit reasoning?

The German seemed not to notice Dean’s turmoil. Slow and steady, he contemplated for another moment what to say, “Neither of us have been shot.”

“ _Not yet_ ,” Dean thought to himself, but kept his mouth shut. He was itching all over, wishing for his gun – but now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure what he’d do with it anyway. Shoot him? Shoot a man flat out – no, he couldn’t do it, despite whomever the fuck they may be or how long it took them to answer questions. So then what would he do? Point it at him, force him to march right back to his trench? But, somehow, to his immense confusion, he found he didn’t want that. No, he wanted to stand there, talk about nothing just a little longer.

            A voice crackled from behind him, hitched nervously. Like a nervous, bumbling kid. Dean’s heel sank into the much, half turning. Chuck was struggling over the side of the trench, straightened dignifying, yanked at his jacket to smooth the crinkles – and slipped in the mud as he approached.  “I – I’ll handle this. Winchester.”

            “Chu -,” he caught himself, glanced at the German’s watchful eyes, “L.T. what are you doing? … _Sir_?”

            “Get back in the trench, Winchester.”

            “Chuck, I -”

            “Goddammit,” his panic contorted to the voice higher than he’d ever heard it, “Get in the fucking trench!” Dean stared at him, Chuck added in an undertone. “Please?”

How peculiar they must look – how utterly weak. Two mud-splattered man standing before the enemy, their backs half turned to whisper to one another. A stupid cringe of self-consciousness shot through Dean’s stomach. “I … alright.”

            He left Chuck to order Cassidey Engel off. He reached the edge of the trench, but hestiated. His boots squelched as he turned – saw the man in German uniform a good distance off, backing away slowly. For instand, their eyes met. The soldier nodded at him, then turned and marched off. And Dean stood there for a second, a silent figure – hand raised absently in farewell.

 

***

“What _happened_?”

Dean shrugged, opened his mouth for a second, and then hesitated. It struck him that he wasn’t altogether sure. “Guy wasn’t hostile.”

            “You didn’t -,” Benny hesitated, then. His eyes darted up and down Dean’s shorter frame, widening every so slightly. There was something lower in his voice then, something barely perceptible. He brushed a blob of muck off Dean’s shoulder. “Dean, why didn’t just stab the idiot? He coulda shot you through, for all you know.”

            “I dunno. Knife’s gone.” Dean watched Benny’s hand fall off his shoulder, thought for the most fleeting instant that it felt impossibly warm on his shoulder. He wondered, for a split second: had he had his knife, would he have done it? The notion brought an uncomfortable twitch to his gut; but yet again, so did Benny’s random gesture. His mind darted back to the illusive knife, buried somewhere in the endless muck of no-man’s-land. “Guess I’ll have to find myself another one.”

            Benny smirked, “And carve your initials in the handle all over again.”

            Dean laughed – as that was precisely what he and Benny had done. It was a stupid ritual, perhaps, but it felt somehow significant – leave a mark. So when they were blown off the surface of the world, at least something of them would remain to scream _Hey, I was here! Don’t forget me! Please, don’t forget …_ They hadn’t really spoken of their reasoning when they’d carved those initials in. But strangely that was what it felt like to Dean. Now he realized the futility of it. Of course, he didn’t know the science of it, but wooden knife handles should decay just as easily as Dean would. For some reason, this made him laugh harder. Everything was twisted around backwards to the point where it was unrecognizable. And then he realized what sounded like laughter in his head was only coughing. Coughing that shook his whole body.

            Benny thumped him on the back. “Hey, you okay?”

            “Yeah,” his eyes were watering a bit as ne nodded. He glanced up at his scruffy face, “Yeah – ‘course I’m okay.”

            And the two of them lapsed into their hobby – smoking. They didn’t talk much, barely shifted when crowds of men passed them by. Their jackets stuck to the muck walls, they were poised there for so long – squelching when they disentangled themselves to receive their rations. And then the sank back into their original spot.

It was just the feeling of company that sustained him really – the notion that, if he wanted to talk, there was someone in the universe who regarded what he had to say realistically: not the complaints of a whiny private, not the legacy of some ridiculously exaggerated soldier. Just the words of Dean.

            It was hard to keep track of time like this, really. The dark crept steadily over them – a teeming bulk, threatening to overtake them. And it was then when the singing began again – the rough tones of a foreign language drifting towards them, met with the same melody in their own trench, only English. Accents seemed to fade a bit, in song.

And, to Dean’s own surprise, another voice had joined them, the melody stringing pleasantly through his head.

Benny squinted at him, “Didn’t know you had such a shit voice.”

“Didn’t think you’ve ever _wanted_ to hear my shit voice.” The laugh came out a bit strangled.

“Well trust me, I don’t wanna anymore.”

Dean’s twisted smirk was barely hidden by the shadow of his helmet. At this moment – despite the croak in his throat, what he now recognized to be a fever coursing hot and sickly through his veins, the sheer stupidity of the action – he found himself moving his mouth in time with the other men. Ever so quietly, singing along. 


End file.
